Crowdsourcing versus Leadership

by Samir Balwani on May 11, 2009 · View Comments

Last week I had the pleasure of being invite to the World Innovation Forum in New York City. (The forum was one of my best to date, and truly was more than just a networking event.) There, I was able to listen to and question, Paul Saffo’s talk about “untangling the future”.

Overall, the speech was great, especially the idea of a creator economy. But, one point stood out in my mind. During his speech, he said that we focus too much on crowdsourcing, and forget about the leadership needed to spark creativity. Well, Mr. Saffo, I respectfully disagree.

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I think that the spark of creativity occurs organically in a crowd, as leaders rise to the occasion. The larger the group, the larger the likelihood of a leader being found.

My thought only works because I assume the brand is including everyone in the “crowd”, that the “crowd” can grow to nearly infinite size, that training leadership is expensive, and that the location of the leader of the leader does not matter. Whether the leader is part of the company or crowd, they can create the spark that builds creativity.

Consider a real life application, where a brand is crowdsourcing a new logo design. They’ve created a site where users can upload a design and vote for the best ones. The campaign will end after 3 months and the brand will choose 1 of the top 5 designs.

Aside from training a number of leaders within the company, it makes little sense to dedicate resources to building leadership in the crowd. After 3 months, when the campaign finished, the crowd may hemorrhage many of its leaders.

So if we’re not building leadership in the crowd, then the brand must decide if it should dedicate resources to building leaders within the company. However, the company only needs a handful of leaders.

Whereas, building a larger crowd means you gain a number of leaders proportionate to the size of the overall crowd. Every time you add a person to crowd, there is a chance that they are a leader, already trained from their life experiences.

This means that companies should train only as many leaders as they need to run a company. And when they have a crowdsourcing campaign, build a community large enough to include organic leaders.

But why do we assume that leadership equals creativity? I can imagine a number of leaders that refuse to change the old way of doing things. They either lack the want to change, or ability to be creative.

Go back to our logo example. Assume that someone uploads the first design. Does this simple act constitute a leader? What if someone sees that design and gets an idea for another design? Is this not “sparking creativity”?

Even if we say that the original design is an act of leadership, the crowd only needs a few leaders to begin the process.

Instead of dedicating more resources to leaders, brands should find ways to better use crowdsourcing. Building and retaining a community can mean having a thinktank at your fingertips.

Leadership is great, but more minds means more ideas. With out ability to instantly organize data – creating large quantities of ideas is no longer a program. With technology, we can now filter quality from quantity.

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Emmanuel Gobillot May 11, 2009 at 12:31 pm: Thanks for the insightful post. Agreed that the danger of crowdsourcing is that we dont put enough value on leadership but the danger of organizations focusing on crowdsourcing leadership is that they will stop the community from forming. The solution is for the organization to maintain a place attractive enough for a community to form.

In researching my new book ‘Leadershift – reinventing leadership for the age of mass collaboration’ I observed that the problem stems from organizations seeing their role as either leading or creating the leaders who can lead the crowdsourcing effort.

My assertion is that the organization must focus its effort as a platform developer/owner who’s role it is to develop the platform for the crowd rather than provide the leaders. The crowd will find its own leaders. As most communities look to exist over time even when they are fluid they will always put a premium on leadership and find their own leaders. The role of the leaders becomes one of enabling the crowd to perform.
EH May 13, 2009 at 4:06 pm: Although creativity *can* come from the leaders of the company, most of the time it doesn’t. There seems to be a difference between the managerial thinker and the creative thinker. Although it is possible for someone to be both, most often it is not that way. I think crowdsourcing is an excellent way to get new ideas and input from people who don’t necessarily think like you.
Joshua Fisher May 17, 2009 at 9:16 pm: In your example you use a crowd sources logo design. Doesn’t that act require a leader who makes the decision to crowd source a design rather than just hiring one of many design firms? I agree with Emmanuel and Saffo because we need leaders to create attractive organizations where crowd sourcing and finding leaders amongst that crowd are valued and rewarded.
Olivier Madel-Felicite May 25, 2009 at 12:29 pm: Samir,

I agree with your analysis as well as the work of Emmanuel, on Leadershift. I am currently having a conversation on my group on Linkedin regarding Leadership 2.0. An Emmanuel is pretty right : Organization view crowdsourcing with the eyes of Capitalism 1.0 how can we control? it is easier to do that, because they can create a value base on scarce economy. Therefore we shouldn’t expect this Behavioral Innovation to come from the regular business street not even Wall Street.

We need a Paradigm Shift (Leadershift), we need creative destruction to open in order to form a new model, a new system base on Leadership 2.0 to change how organization become the Leader and focus on :

* outcomes not incomes

* people not product

* creativity not productivity

and implement:

Leadership 2.0

* No top and no bottom, just one fluid dynamic system
* The network is formed by common passion
* Leaders form naturally and only inspire to bind and direct group. They are among them as one of them.
* Groups are more fluid, dysfunctioning members can connect with other groups
* No way to bring down complete organization by compromizing members
* Reorganizations happen all the time and are easy.
* Network/ lava lamp structure

Than only we will see emerging Capitalism 2.0 and Economy 2.0, this is how only way to move away from the Zombyeconomy we’re currently in, VCs failed us, banks forgot their mission, so did the governments…etc.

As an Emotional Intelligence practitioner, I have to focus on these new skills, the “US” not just the “ME”, in order to impulse these new way of thinking…. and this is disruptive…

Have a look at this presentation and tell me what you think, it is a collective work with my group… http://prezi.com/69743/

I strongly believe that in Leadership 2.0, the all organisation should behave as a Leader, with Stars or experts atoms contributing around the platform whose aim is to provide innovative tools in order to facilitate collaboration, discussion, creativity, promotion, marketing and even helping the prosumers to generate income or start their businesses.

But how we will see that happen, when the only purpose of the leaders of today is to make as much cash as they can in their pocket.

by the way Samir, I’m looking for someone with computer skills particularly in implementing crowdsource tools…? would you know anyone? I would like to engage conversation with such group on an entrepreneurial project.

Olivier
Samir Balwani May 11, 2009 at 12:52 pm: Can’t agree with you more Emmanuel. I’m excited to hear about your book. Would love to read it, when you finish it. Please keep me updated !
Samir Balwani May 17, 2009 at 10:41 pm: Thanks for your comment Joshua, I never said that there shouldn’t be a leader at all. But, the company only needs one leader to decide to crowd source. Once that decision is made, a lot of resources need to be dedicated to creating the crowd. That’s where the disconnect is, deciding how resources should be dedicated between crowd building and leadership training.